


Five Times Mama Was on Either Side of a Gun, and One Time it was a Butter Knife

by EdgarAllenPoet



Series: Monster Hunting [fics about TAZ Amnesty] [14]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, Ducknerva mention, Families of Choice, Gen, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Minor Character Death, Monster Hunters, OG Pine Guard, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Queer Themes, Sternclay mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24192271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: Madeline Cobb had five abominations under her belt-- alone for two, dragging Thacker around for three-- when she found Barclay in the woods.Or, Barclay had found her more accurately, but Mama liked to remember it the other way simply for the hilarity of threatening to "put Barclay back in the woods where she found him" on the rare occasion they were rubbing each other the wrong way.
Series: Monster Hunting [fics about TAZ Amnesty] [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1503023
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	Five Times Mama Was on Either Side of a Gun, and One Time it was a Butter Knife

**Author's Note:**

> If you're uncomfortable with guns, you're going to want to skip over this one. Wrote it forever-and-awhile ago. It's a little bit of a nostalgic piece, as I'm about to move out of my parents' home, and I have a lot of wonderful memories from spending time with my father and some guns out in the woods. Thought I might grow up to be a monster hunter, when I was little.
> 
> Anyways, this is a five times fic. Mama and her experiences through the years, some of them good, some of them bad, but y'know. That's life.

1\. 

It was a hot summer day in West Virginia when Madeline Cobb learned to shoot. She was five years old, the year 1966. The smoke from the cigarette pinched between her father’s teeth made her eyes sting, and the sun brought prickling sweat to her skin as he showed her how to cradle the grown-up sized .22 against her shoulder and line up her shot with a tilted head. Her mama had protested the whole thing, but her father wasn’t hearing any of it. 

“God damn, Dakota, the kid’s gotta learn to protect herself, ain’t she?” he said, and his accent was as thick as the mud in the crick out back a ways away, deep in the woods where she wasn’t supposed to play without permission, but no one ever paid enough attention to stop her wandering.

He lined up cans along their back fence facing into the woods, and he kept her out there until she hit every one in a row without fail. Her arms were a little too short, shaky, hands a bit too pudgy with baby fat to get a proper grip on the gun, but she didn’t let that stop her. Her father never did much of anything besides work, sleep, and smoke. Even at five, she knew the pricelessness of this bonding time, though she’d grow to resent it more and more as she gained years.

When she takes on her first abomination nearly twenty years later, chasing it through the woods with the gun her mama left in the hallway closet “just in case,” she would swear bitterly over the fact that she only knew how to hold the thing, aim the thing, shoot the damn thing because that son of a bitch had taught her how. 

But as a child, she wasn’t quite that jaded. After all, he may have been a no-good, lazy, son of a bitch, but he hadn’t left them yet. She hadn’t yet watched her mama standing in the kitchen in her scrubs after a long shift, staring down at the note on the kitchen table with one hand clutching the back of her neck, murmuring to herself, “What the sam hell are we supposed to do now?” as Madeline peeked through the doorway, wrapped in a blanket and wondering what made her mama look so tired. 

Her father had tucked her into bed the night before, said he was too tired for a bedtime story and watched the news too loud on the living room TV until Madeline couldn't keep her ears open to listen. When she’d woken in the early hours of the morning to the sound of her mother coming home, he’d been long gone. 

Her mama didn’t like guns, said she dealt with too many gunshot wounds in the ER, said she saw too many hunters “two pounds short of an eight-pound brain” coming in with holes in them. She told Madeline that you couldn’t imagine the blood. 

One day Madeline wouldn’t have to imagine the blood. She’d see it first hand so many times that the image danced behind her eyelids when she tried to get rest at night. It’s crazy the things you remember. The wound a shotgun makes as it bursts out the other side of someone, a dozen tiny holes tearing through the flesh and mingling with fabric or fur. The way cigarette smoke feels in your eyes, different from campfire smoke, a bit too sweet. The sound of her father’s voice as he said, “Shut up and go to sleep, Maddie.” The last thing he ever said to her. 

No one else had ever called her Maddie. Her mama dropped the nickname when her father had gone. 

  
  


\---

> “Ya hold it like this,” she told Mike, standing behind him and moving his arms into a better position. “You wanna push and pull at the same time, tighten your arms up, relax your shoulders, there ya go.” 
> 
> “Christ it’s complicated,” Mike swore, gnawing his bottom lip between his teeth. She walked around him, staying out of the way of the gun but taking survey of his stance. She frowned and reached up to pull his lip free with her thumb, laughing a bit to herself as he scoffed and wrinkled his nose up, like an impudent little kid whose mother just wiped the mess off their face with a spit-wet napkin.
> 
> He was a kid, compared to her. Twenty years her junior and skipping his college lectures to run around with their crew in the woods. She’d given him hell for that when she’d caught him in her basement that morning, but she’d let him stick around and said she might as well teach him something if he was supposed to be learning anyway. 
> 
> She wondered if his parents knew where he was, if they kept any kind of tab on him. She knew nineteen years old was “legally an adult, Mama, jeez oh’Petes,” but really he was just a baby. Barely had a lick of life on him, and yet here he was, running amuck in the woods chasing baddies and risking his life alongside the rest of them. 
> 
> He had his bowie knife and his rifle, but that wasn’t enough for every fight. Barclay had taught him to wield an ax (first and foremost setting him loose on an entire mess of wood that needed chopping, just to have a bit of a Mr. Myagi moment, the two of them snickering to themselves from the kitchen window while Mike set at his task diligently, convinced he was learning to fight). But he didn’t know his butt from apple butter when it came to handguns, so Mama gave him her heaviest and showed him the ropes. 
> 
> If he could shoot this, with the shattering noise and bruising kick-back, with the way it danced in your hands the second you pulled the trigger, then he could shoot anything.
> 
> The kid had to learn to protect himself.

\---

  
  
  


2.

Madeline Cobb was in high school the first time someone pointed a gun at her. She was half-way out of Katy Baren’s bedroom window-- they’d heard the footsteps in the hall, and the turning of the doorknob, and they’d scrambled away from each other in a mad dash to hide-- when the door swung open with an ungodly creak, and there he was. Mr. Baren stood as a silhouette, outlined by the doorframe and light in the hallway. He stood five foot five and wasn’t intimidating by any definition of the word, except for the shotgun held at his hip pointing directly at her.

He froze, and she froze, and Katy released a pitiful sob into the blanket she clutched to her pulled-up knees. Mads was halfway out the window, one leg in and one leg out, wearing nothing but her jeans, sneakers, and bra. Her t-shirt was clutched in her teeth, going with her to hide the evidence, but she hadn’t had the time to put it back on after grabbing it. 

She stared at Mr. Baren-- more like, she stared at the gun pointing at her-- and wondered if she had the time to tumble out the window and run before he fired it.

Kepler in 1978 wasn’t particularly friendly to girls like her, and Mads knew this. Her mother made sure to warn her, and even if she hadn’t, high school had made it clear enough. 

Rural West Virginia didn’t like brown girls with loud opinions and broad shoulders, girls that wore men’s jeans and bit their nails to the quick, girls that probably weren’t actually girls if that was an option. Girls that climbed through other girls’ bedroom windows on school nights and kissed them the ways boys were supposed to and did other things Mads wasn’t keen to talk about out loud.

Things that found her in just her bra, jeans, and sneakers hanging out of Katy Baren’s bedroom window, while Mr. Baren surveyed the room with a wrinkled brow and a heavy frown. He looked from his daughter, to Mads, and back again, and Mads thought that maybe she could make it to the ground and off his property, but she wasn’t sure she could make it home before the cops caught up to her, and even if she did, Kepler was small. They knew where to find her.

She doubted Mr. Baren would actually shoot her, but it wasn’t an impossibility. 

She should run, really. 

She ought to throw herself out the window.

She couldn’t make herself move. 

“Madeline Cobb, is that you, young lady?” his voice was nasally by nature and gravelly from smoking, and he hit the light switch to squint at her, gun still pointed and held steady. If Mads were any less brave than she was, she would have gulped. 

Brave, maybe, but damn stupid. 

She dropped her t-shirt from her teeth into her lap, said, "Yes sir," figuring herself already caught. 

He nodded, lowered the gun but didn't put it down. He fished a pair of glasses from his pocket and pressed them onto his nose, then hefted the gun up and gestured out the door with it. "A word, if ya don't mind," he said in a calm and even voice. 

Katy was crying, face buried in her bedsheets. Mads considered throwing herself out the window, wondering how much it would hurt to hit the ground. 

"I ain't gonna hurt'cha," Mr. Baren said, and he sounded sincere about it. Madeline really didn't wanna jump out the second-story window. She sighed, let her shoulders slump down from her ears, and she acquiesced. 

"Alright then," she agreed, climbing properly into the bedroom. She yanked her shirt back on, smoothing down the front and wondering if he planned on killing her downstairs instead. He went to the kitchen, dropping the gun on the table and yanking a chair out for Madeline to sit in. She did so, hesitantly, and he seemed satisfied. 

"Coffee?" he asked. She was afraid he'd poison her. 

"Nah, I'm good, thank you." 

He pulled a mason jar out of the fridge with a shrug, popped the lid off, and set it on a burner to heat. Old coffee, it seemed. Mads' mama kept hers too, saved them a dollar instead of throwing out the extra. He let that heat in silence and poured it into a mug when it started to steam, then he brought the mug with him as he sat across the table. 

Mads realized too late that she'd missed her chance to grab the gun and make a break for it. Keep herself from getting shot. She wasn't too smart these days, it seemed. She stared down at the gun on the table and kept her hands carefully folded in her lap. 

Mr. Baren started gracefully with two fingers pinching the bridge of his nose: "My daughter isn't one of those homosexuals," he said. Mads kept her thoughts about that to herself. 

"I don't think you are one, either," he told her. He took a chug of his coffee, still steaming, bitter, and black. The same as Mads felt, just then. 

"You're a good kid," he said, "Just confused is all. World doesn't make sense for you kids these days the way it used to." 

He sighed, and his shoulders slumped a bit. He dropped a heavy, blunted fingertip on the table to punctuate his words. "There will be no repeat of this night. My Katy don't need to get wrapped up in this kind of trouble, you hear me? We don't speak of it, not a single word, and I never want you talking to her again." 

Under such circumstances, with a gun on the kitchen table, Mads would have agreed to just about anything. Sixteen years wasn't a terrible amount of time to be alive, and she'd rather like to keep at it for a while longer if she could. She nodded. He said, "We have an understanding?" 

He was wearing matching pajamas, the kinds with drawstring pants and a button-up shirt. He had on slippers and glasses. His light brown, half silver hair was thinning. He was ghost white and his face was sunken with age. He had a shotgun on the table between them, and his kitchen was nearly the size of Madeline's whole apartment. 

She said, "You ain't gonna shoot me?" and his response was a tired grin. 

"So long as you stay outta my windows from here on out." 

That was a fair trade. Katy was nice, but it wasn't love, and it wasn't anything terribly wonderful. She was mean and a bit too pretty, and she didn't talk to Mads at school anyways. Beyond secret kisses under the bleachers and a few chicken scratch love letters exchanged in homeroom, there was nothing there anyway. Mads could bear to miss it. 

"I'll stay outta your windows," she agreed, and he nodded, took another long chug of his coffee.

"Good," he said, "Do you want a ride home?" 

Mads elected to walk instead, got home with hours to spare before her mama made it back from her double. She tucked herself into bed and counted her blessings, blinked away the stinging behind her eyes and tried to forget the tingling on her skin every place Katy had touched her. 

She thought about herself with one of those blown through shotgun wounds, bloody and shredded in the Baren’s front yard, and she thought herself quite fortunate.

  
  
  


\---

  
  


> “Shit, Maddie!” Thacker yelped, clutching his ears and doubling over, rolling his jaw to get his hearing working properly again after the sawed-off rang out loud as death barely a foot from his head. 
> 
> Mads stood there, holding the thing suspended in the air, glaring off into the dark woods past the gate as she scanned for the creature they’d just watch vanish. 
> 
> “I told you not to call me that,” she hissed, and spat, and shoved the gun back into its home-made holster as she stalked forwards into the night. 
> 
> Thacker rubbed at his ear, wondered if his hearing would ever be the same. “Gotdamn,” he swore. “Tell me ya got the thing.” 
> 
> He tripped after her, tangling up briefly in the brambles, and stopped short when she spun to face him. Her smile was sharp. “Easy hunt,” she told him, and he whooped and kicked the bramble off him, and she laughed out loud and fired her gun joyously into the air.
> 
>   
>    
>    
> 

\---

3.

It was a good thing Barclay remembered the library books. 

So long as they hit the bottom of the drop-off bin before Gayle checked in come seven o’clock the next morning, they were technically “on time.” There were few things Barclay hated more than turning his books in late, partly because it was silly to be indebted a mere seventy-three cents (and even sillier to dig through the couch cushions and cup holders trying to find those seventy-three cents), and partly because of having to face Gayle the next time he wanted to check something out, knowing that  _ she _ knew and was disappointed. 

“Honestly, young man, how hard is it to remember the due date?” she’d ask as she handed him his two cents in change.

Barclay had at least three-quarters of a century on this woman, and he was only a man in the loosest, human definition of the word, so he didn’t appreciate her chastising in the least. Plus he always lost those two cents in his pockets and wound up fishing them out of the washing machine.

How hard was it to remember a due date? Impossibly hard, it turned out. He’d remembered halfway through brushing his teeth, and he’d borrowed Mama’s keys and made his trip out a quarter-after-eleven that night, wearing pajama pants, rubber boots, and a t-shirt that read ‘Kepler High Track and Field’ even though he didn’t know a single person who’d been on the Kepler High Track and Field team. He certainly hadn’t been.

But he wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing the books were still sitting on his dresser, late. He couldn’t give Gayle the satisfaction.

He was only halfway to the courthouse (the library sat in that same square, two ancient buildings looking out of place in the podunk town) when a ruckus caught his attention. Everything in Kepler shut down around nine, and every hour following was dead quiet. Barclay drove with the windows down and the cassette player warbling quietly, tapping his fingers and enjoying the warm summer air. No wind, no abominations for another month. Once he turned in his books and quelled the anxiety fizzling in his gut, everything would be perfect and peaceful.

That was what he was thinking, at least, until he heard the shouting. 

At first, he wasn't quite sure what he was hearing. He slowed the truck down, letting off the gas and downshifting to neutral to hush the engine. Down the road a little ways was a small bar, a place he'd been dragged along to a handful of times back in the day when the Pine Guard was young and rowdy enough to party between hunts. It sat a bit off the street with a humble gravel parking lot and a smattering of cars. Two people stood in the parking lot-- the source of the yelling-- and Barclay drove past watching as a man grabbed his smaller partner by the hair and shoved her back against one of the cars. He was shouting. She screamed.

Son of a bitch.

Barclay checked his mirrors and threw her into a u-turn, hitting the gas again as he headed back the way he came. He swung it into the parking lot, shutting it off in a self-made parking spot, and he was out of the truck and jogging their way before he even registered what he was doing.

Despite being a walking anxiety attack, Barclay was actually pretty good in emergencies. Years of practice with abomination situations had given him iron nerves for things that actually mattered, for danger and confrontation and all that. He could throw a punch and fire a gun. He knew how to stand for a fight, found the movements logged into his muscle memory.

It felt like nothing, then, to walk up to the couple in the parking lot and say, "Hey! Are y'all doing okay over here?"

The closer he got to them, the more obvious it became that things were definitely not okay over here. He still worried that he was intruding, that he was stepping into something that was absolutely none of his business, except that Barclay could see them illuminated clearly by the parking lot's lone street light. The woman had a swollen lip and a tear-stained face, had old bruises healing on her arms, and the man was trembling, spitting mad. He was crowding her back against the car, looming over her.

He turned to Barclay, eyes flashing.

"Mind your business, buddy!" the man snapped, and the lady flinched. She glared at her partner. Barclay stepped a bit closer.

He said, "I'm gonna make this my business, actually," and addressed the woman as soon as he was close enough. "Is this man bothering you?" he asked.

The guy was livid, yelling about how 'she was his wife, he'd bother her if he wanted to bother her!' and going on and on with threats one way or another. He kept his hands to himself, though, and something about that made Barclay see red. The lady was painted in bruises, and this chicken-shit asshole didn't even dare to hit someone who could take it.

He stepped between the two and asked the woman over his shoulder, "Do you want to get out of here?" while keeping his eyes firmly on the fuming man before him. The guy didn't even reek of booze, not that that would be any excuse. The lady nodded, and that was all Barclay needed. He ushered her off, keeping himself between her and her partner as he led her off towards his truck.

"I ain't goin' to the police," she said as they got closer to the truck, the furious man still raging at their backs but not pursuing. Barclay had found it sickly satisfying to look down his nose at him. He often felt like a lumbering bull in a china shop with his towering six-foot-seven frame, but he had to admit it came in handy every now and then.

"That's fine," he told her. He opened the door and she hesitated.

"I can't go home." She glanced past Barclay. The man was pacing back and forth by the car they'd just left. "My folks won't be up this late either."

Barclay nodded. "Amnesty Lodge's got a room if you're interested."

She tilted her head back to regard his offer, said, "I don't got much money on me."

Barclay shrugged one shoulder, leaned his hip against the side of the truck and hoped his body language was coming off as casual and non-threatening. The nighttime quiet was still disturbed by the man's ranting. Barclay said, "I got some pull with the owner."

When she hesitated, he said, "We can figure something else out, if you'd like, but I don't feel good leaving you here."

She nodded, finally, said, "Guess it's worth the risk of kidnapping," and climbed into the truck.

The Lodge was dark and still when they’d gotten there, the dim nighttime lights glowing through the main room windows, the neon sign that could be lit to read “OCCUPANCY” extinguished and dark. A sign near the front door said “After hours, ring for service” and showed an arrow pointed to the doorbell. Barclay bypassed that but didn’t get the chance to put his key in the lock before the door was swinging open in front of them. 

Moira stood in her housecoat and slippers, hair pinned back in a tight bun and tied with a handkerchief, a cup of tea in her hands. 

“Oh,” she said, “It’s you. Come in, then.”

She stepped aside, and Barclay walked on in, his guest following behind him. "Moira, can you help me set a room up, please?"

Moira went about introducing herself and exchanging names with the girl-- "Bethenny, oh yes, I think I know your mother from church, dear"-- something Barclay had forgotten to do. She went off then to get the room set up and ready, while Barclay ducked behind their front desk to flick the switch on their occupancy sign, a clear signal to the Lodge residents that someone human was poking around, to keep their disguises intact.

Bethenny came to lean against the counter, had her mouth opened in a question when the daytime lights flicked on and brought the room from dim and visible to painfully bright.

"Where on earth are you driving at this time of-- oh."

Mama stood at the foot of the stairs, arms crossed and eyes curious as she looked Bethenny over. Barclay watched the details register on Mama's face, the cigarette scent, the rumpled clothes and messed up hair, the split lip, the blood, the shine that still decorated her cheeks from crying.

"Moira's setting the room up," Barclay said, knowing there would be questions to answer later.

Mama nodded, walked further into the room to usher the girl away from the desk and towards some of the plush chairs in the corner. "You've had a hell of a night, haven't you? Barclay, can you put on a pot of coffee?" 

There was a conversation to follow, something Barclay didn’t bother eavesdropping on while he prepared their coffee in the kitchen. Whatever Mama had to say, though, it convinced Bethenny to relax and stay the night. Convinced her she was safe enough to tuck in there. Whatever Bethenny had to say, it had Mama going to her office and returning dressed and loaded. She stood in the main room doorway, hands on her hips, looking Barclay up and down with a grim smile and a raised eyebrow. 

Barclay had known Mama for the better half of fifteen years now, had fought beside her, cried on her shoulder, tended her wounds, and trusted her with his life, and vice versa. However, he didn't pretend to know everything about her. He didn't know what was going through her head-- what sparked that fierce, fiery protectiveness in her-- that had her looking at him like that.

Ready for a fight. Split evenly between determined and gleeful. Something glinted in her eyes.

“If you’re coming with as back-up, you ain’t doing it in yer PJ’s,” she teased him, and that was the first time that evening he realized what he was wearing. 

“I’ll stay in the car,” he decided, knowing that if push came to shove it wouldn’t matter what he wore. Then he thought about what “push” and “shove” might include, and he added, “Don’t kill him,” with a barely suppressed sigh. 

Mama’s reply was a laugh, hushed for the nighttime, but it did nothing to make him feel any better. He was pretty sure that if the rage blooming in his own chest was enough to make him want to beat the man senseless with his own two fists, Mama couldn't have been far off from considering homicide. Regardless, she said, "I ain't gonna kill him." 

"Uh huh." 

"I'm just gonna scare him. You comin' or what?" 

"Christ," Barclay groaned and covered his eyes for a moment. 

He would follow Mama to the ends of the earth if that's where she was headed. She gave him a wink-- suggesting that whatever scare tactics she had in mind, she was going to enjoy them far too much-- and a lazy grin. 

He grabbed his keys and followed her out the door.

It was after-- Mama in the driver’s seat, Barclay a little bit breathless from watching Mama point her revolver at the shithead’s crotch and dare him to ‘go on, take a swing if ya like hittin’ women so much.’ They’d found him in the parking lot where Barclay had left him, and after scaring him absolutely shitless and leaving him a trembling, wide-eyed mess, they’d jump-started the dead battery that had started his rage in the first place and told him he’d better get his God damn act together if he wanted to keep his marriage: “And if you want to never see me again,” Mama said, after bloodying the guy’s nose with a swift backhand after he got just a little too mouthy.

It was after all of that, Mama humming quietly along to the radio as if there wasn’t blood on her knuckles and a stranger sleeping in the Lodge, that Barclay remembered. 

He sat up straight and gasped out, “Oh damn it! My library books.”

Mama damn near drove them off the road laughing too hard, but she also turned the car around and drove them back to the library. His books hit the bin just past four in the morning, Mama bright-eyed, smiling, gun in the center console between them, Barclay’s anxiety mostly subdued.

\---

  
  


> Bullets whizzed past Mama's face as she stepped through the door into the main room of Amnesty Lodge. The projectiles were accompanied by a chorus of giggling, and Mama grinned a bit to herself before tiptoeing towards the nearest sofa, where the laughter was coming from. 
> 
> She crouched down in front of it, waited patiently for two little blonde heads to peak over the top before she leapt to her feet and roared at them, causing the chorus to start anew, screams and giggles as the two youngest residents fell into a pile on top of each other. 
> 
> She sat on the couch then, peaking over at them. Dani was snickering behind her hand, awfully proud of herself, and Mama was glad to see the girl smile. Teenagers were sullen creatures-- she knew this. Teenagers who'd been banished from their homeland and fled from war were especially sullen. Jake was a good change for the kid, even if his own situation wasn't any less heart-wrenching. 
> 
> Sometimes you wouldn't know it, looking at the boy. He glowed in childish optimism, would have fit in seamlessly alongside any of Kepler's other eighth-graders without a second glance. Hand him a nerf gun, and he was happy. 
> 
> Mama picked a foam dart up off the couch and tossed it over the back at them. "Ya better learn to aim those things better, ya missed by a mile," she said, then meandered down the hallway towards her office. 

\---

  
  
  


4.

Madeline Cobb had five abominations under her belt-- alone for two, dragging Thacker around for three-- when she found Barclay in the woods. Or, Barclay had found her more accurately, but Mama liked to remember it the other way simply for the hilarity of threatening to "put Barclay back in the woods where she found him" on the rare occasion they were rubbing each other the wrong way.

The abomination was some kind of cougar crossed with a nightmare. It was a bitch and a half to hunt the thing. She'd gotten a little used to insectoids and fire ghosts and vampiric little nasties. Things that oozed black slime and chattered in sounds so distinctly alien.

This creature was just a cougar, or you would think it was, if not for the black seeping between its teeth, clouding its eyes, and the animals slaughtered in such a way that nothing born of earth could have invented. Just a puddle of ooze when the creature was done with them. Mysterious. Savage. Silent on its feet, invisible in the shadows, and faster than the human eye could reasonably conceive.

Thacker had the bright idea to lure it in with entrails, and after three long days of dragging deer guts through the woods around the gate, Mama stumbled upon it when it dropped out of the trees on top of her. 

The tussle lasted only a few seconds, but those seconds were burned into her memory at a laggard pace. When she thinks back to those seconds, she's liable to lose hours of time. The weight of it dropping on her, the fear so heavy it shut her breathing down, crushed under piercing claws that burned like venom, coated in the blood of slaughtered woodland creatures up to her elbows. 

Thacker was waiting for her signal, was waiting for a call on the walkie talkie that she'd misplaced when she went down. Her gun was pinned underneath her, inaccessible as she did everything within her power to simply keep the razor-sharp bits of the creature away from her. She would die, and all he'd find was a puddle of remains. She was horribly, terribly alone.

And then suddenly she wasn't. 

Something slammed into the creature, knocking it off of her in a flurry of fur and claws and deafening roars. Sharp, sharp claws caught in her skin and tore across her chest as the cougar was ripped away. She screamed in reflex, the pain blinding, but only let herself have a second in that moment before scrambling to her knees and swinging the gun up into her arms.

There, in the dark forest in front of her-- less than half a mile from her best-kept secret, less than five miles from her childhood home-- was Bigfoot. 

They struggled together, grabbing, scratching, biting. The cougar dug its teeth into the Bigfoot's shoulder, aiming for the throat, and the responding roar shook the trees like thunder. The Bigfoot leaped to its feet and slammed the creature into a tree, and that's when Madeline got her sense back to her. She stumbled to her feet, locked her gun into her shoulder, and fired. 

The cougar-- hardly ten feet away from her-- exploded in a splatter of blood, brains, and black slime that painted herself and the Bigfoot. Bigfoot scrambled back at the gunshot, tripping over itself and falling onto its ass on the forest floor. Madeline didn't watch the light leave the cougar the way she knew to expect from these things, swirling out of it brilliantly white and glowing, before taking off like a phoenix rising into the night sky, gone for good. 

Probably. She wasn't actually sure.

Point being, she didn't give the cougar another second of her time, instead whirling on the Bigfoot and pumping the gun to reload. She held it in a white-knuckled grip as she stalked closer to the creature, and as it scrambled back in the dirt away from her. If she knew anything about monsters, she knew it was strike first and strike to kill. She squinted one eye, hardened her resolve, and--

"Wait!"

She paused. A monster had never spoken in a human voice before. 

"Wait, wait, no, I can explain!" 

Madeline narrowed her eyes, adjusted her grip, and willed her hands to stop shaking. With the creature on the ground, it was easy to tower over him. She gritted her teeth and asked, "What kinda abomination are you?" 

"What kinda-- what?" 

"You a Bigfoot, or something else?" she asked, His eyes darted around the woods, panicked. 

"I-"

Madeline could taste blood, her jaw ached. She shouted, " **What are you doing in my woods** !?"

And his voice was a frantic, stuttered gasp, as he hollered back, " **I don't know!** I-I didn't know I'd pop out here, I wasn't-- I'm not-- Hey, hey, can we please put the gun down?" 

Her lip curled up, suspicion coiling in her gut as she lowered the gun a few inches. She asked, "How come you can talk? None of the others can talk." 

"The others?" 

"The abominations! Those critters that pop through that God damn gate every full moon and cause all kindsa hell in my town!"

The Bigfoot stared blankly at her, then, expression unreadable. He said, "You can see the gate?" and panic bloomed anew in her chest. Nobody else could see the gate-- she knew that-- and here she was talking about it in the middle of the woods. 

Some secret.

He gulped, inched back a bit like he was trying to find the chance to get up and run. She dropped the gun to hang down next to her. He shifted a bit, wincing as he awoke the pain in his shoulder. The blood was starting to matte his fur, there. He risked glancing away from her, looking down at the wound with a nauseated expression. 

"You need fixed up, don't'cha?" she said, realizing the creature had saved her life and all. If nothing else, she owed him some stitches. She crouched, kept the gun at the ready, and the Bigfoot's eyes widened in surprise. "How 'bouts this," she offered. "I get you cleaned up, and you don't try 'n eat me." 

"Why would I try to eat you?" 

"Swear it," she bit at him, and he grimaced. 

"I won't try and eat you." He said it like the words tasted bad in his mouth. 

She nodded, held a hand out to him. "Alright then. Nice to meet you, Bigfoot. You can call me Mads." 

He stared at her hand curiously, like he didn't know what to do with it, before hesitantly extending his own. She took it and squeezed a handshake. He still looked unsure, but he nodded. 

He squeezed back, strong and strange with massive hairy hands. "I'm Barclay."

  
  


\---

> They're in the kitchen, and it is an ordinary Tuesday. A hunt had come and gone a few days prior, and their injuries were on their way towards healing. Mama's aging skeleton ached as a storm raged outside their windows, throwing buckets of water against the Lodge windows and rattling the walls. Much more of that and the lights would start to flicker, and Mama would have to trudge through the rain to dig the generator out of her workshop. 
> 
> Aubrey, who was apparently unused to vicious West Virginian thunderstorms ("it's not that, Mama, we are literally on a mountain, what if there's a mudslide!?") sat curled up and tense at the rickety kitchen table, squeezed into the room for prep and personal use, separate from the nicer seating area in the main room of the Lodge. 
> 
> Other residents were biding their time in the main room or in their own personal rooms. The cable reception was pretty bad, what with the wires being tossed around in the wind, and she could hear frustrated groans every so often as Jake hauled himself off the couch to pound his fist on their mid-nineties box setup. She wasn't worried. The thing was older than he was. It had survived worse than a few hearty thunks. 
> 
> She knew Moira was in there as well, giving gentle but vaguely snide opinions about a game of Life happening between Miguel and Tasha. Fawn might have been in there-- but perhaps not, the deer-featured halfling never made much noise, though they had resided there for nearly two years now. The fella only looked to be about ten years old, but Barclay and everyone else assured her that the halfling was as old as time ("or, at least a century, Mama, look at their facial features").
> 
> "You sure you don't wanna play a game with the others?" she asked Aubrey. "Or maybe Dani wouldn't mind the company?" 
> 
> "You trying to get rid of me?" Aubrey asked with a sly smile. She said, "Nah, no, I'm okay right here, thank you." 
> 
> Mama nodded sagely, "Ground level, far away from the lightning. Wanna go down to the cellar?" 
> 
> "Oh yeah, that'll make me feel better, spending time with Mister Teeth and Homicide."
> 
> Mama had lived a long life, had experienced a lot of trauma, and had spent most of her adult life perfecting the art of lying. It is because of this that she didn't flinch at the comment, that she thought miserably of Thacker locked up in the basement and didn't let out any heartache.
> 
> She shrugged and said, "Real rabies case, that one is," and scrubbed a little harder at the inside of her gun barrel. She'd put off cleaning it irresponsibly, and it was twice as much work now trying to catch up with the maintenance.
> 
> Aubrey snorted a laugh, asked, "Whoa, holy shit, what if it's actually just rabies?" 
> 
> Mama could only dream. But also, no, he would have been dead by now. 
> 
> The kitchen door slammed open in a sudden clatter as Barclay stepped inside and the wind tore it away from him. He flinched at the noise-- as did Aubrey, nearly falling out of her seat-- and Mama took deep, measured breaths and didn't move a single muscle. 
> 
> Barclay shoved the door closed behind him, fighting the wind at his back, then straightened up and shook the rain from his sopping wet mop of hair like some sort of overgrown puppy. Droplets landed on the kitchen table, too close to her firearm for her liking. She liked to take good care of her things. 
> 
> "Watch where you shake that thing," she grumbled, and Aubrey cackled at the innuendo. Barclay smiled and rolled his eyes, dropping a soggy cardboard box onto the counter. Permanent marker on the side read "candles n gear" in Thacker's near-illegible scrawl. 
> 
> He said, "It's crazy out there," and his eyes glinted deviously, far younger than he actually was. He said, "You got something on your face there, Aubrey," and scrubbed a dripping sleeve over her face. 
> 
> She squawked, sputtering and laughing, while Barclay snickered to himself and retreated quickly to his box of supplies. Mama rolled her eyes. 
> 
> "Children, the both of you," she said. "Don't make me put you back in the woods where I found you." 
> 
> Barclay rolled his eyes, humor painted on his features. "You go ahead and do that. Cook baked beans for dinner three nights in a row and have yourself a mutiny." 
> 
> "Wait," Aubrey said. "You found Barclay in the woods? You found Bigfoot?  _ In the woods? _ " 
> 
> Mama held her dissected barrel up to the light and squinted through it, satisfied with the smooth lack of grime. "Where else was I 'sposed to find him?" she asked.
> 
> Barclay said, "Tindr," and Mama chucked her bore mop at him.
> 
>   
>    
>    
> 

\---

  
  


5.

"I reckon you don't know who I am," said the woman who stood between Mads and her truck in the police station parking lot. They both stopped, stared at each other, Mads blinking into the searing late morning sunlight at the woman who trembled before her. 

She'd just spent the night in the station, cleaning up the mess that was Mike's passing. She and Sherrif Nealy had an agreement, brought upon by necessity and a few carefully kept secrets about each other. Nealy was on a need to know basis, clued in when absolutely necessary, and Mads was mostly left alone to do her work. 

It was a good system. Nealy was good people, even if Mads had a tendency to hate all cops by association. She figured Kepler was a bit different, had to be. She also knew Nealy's mother's phone number, knew who to contact if she really needed to send a message, grown man or otherwise. Couldn't do that to the NYPD. They must have had no mothers, since they seemed to have no fear.

Regardless, Mads had spent a long, long evening talking Nealy through a carefully edited version of the latest disaster, of what had gone wrong, of what might need to happen next time.

Next time.

Next time someone got slaughtered? Next time they dealt with something quite this ugly? 

Mads couldn't think about it. She still had blood under her fingernails, sweat gone thick and pungent under her arms and behind her knees. She'd had enough coffee to shake her, felt her eyes burn from exhaustion anyways.

She'd seen the thing strike, held Mike in her arms while he bled out. Thrown off a cliff-- a hell of a way to go, in a war like this. Too fucking natural. Too human. Too easy. 

"He just fell?" Nealy had asked, incredulous. 

"Your adrenaline flies in hunts like something you wouldn't believe," Mads had said, telling the truth in that statement alone. "We didn't see the cliff till he was falling over the edge of it." 

Mads had gone after the abomination with her bare fists. Barclay had wrapped his arms around her and hauled her back from the creature's bloody mess of a body while Thacker lit a fire and set the corpse ablaze "just in case."

Somehow, despite all of that, despite the fact that Mads had thrown up in the break room sink of the police station before giving Nealy her watered-down depiction, the woman in front of her seemed to be having a worse day.

The woman in front of her was Mike Castino's mother.

Of course, Mads recognized her. Of course she did. She'd dropped Mike off at home enough times-- he was young, just a kid, still living at home and taking courses at the community college the next town over, stubborn as all get out and too damn clever for them to kick him off the force, so they'd taken him in. 

She'd seen Mrs. Castino watching them from the front porch, had seen her pinched brow and tired eyes. Mike had complained endlessly about getting his mother off of his back, about her fretting, her nagging, about how hard it was to keep this all a secret when he used to tell her everything. 

Mads couldn't imagine her mother still being alive for monster hunting. 

Mads stood in the parking lot, gobsmacked and so damn tired, and stared wordlessly at Mrs. Castino. What was there to say? 

Mrs. Castino said, "I don't know what y'all're doin' runnin' around out there in the woods, but you shoulda kept my Michael outta it." 

Mads wanted to say, 'I tried.' She hadn't tried hard enough.

His mother said, "He was bright. A good kid. Wanted to go to medical school, did you know that?" 

Mads did know that. The boy stocked their first aid kit, taught them more about disinfecting wounds and assessing concussions than they'd ever figured out on their own, claimed to have learned it all off 'youtube videos,' whatever that was. 

She also knew that he was failing half his courses that semester, missed lectures and exams under the stress of monster hunting, had dropped out of the EMT training course he was taking on the weekends. 

"He had no business joinin' your little hunting club. Wildlife population control, or game hunting, I don't give a shit, you took my baby!" 

Her volume grew as she spoke, from firm lecturing to hysterical screaming. Mads stared dead-eyed and silent, wondered what she ought to do about it, and then someone came jogging around the corner.

A young woman, younger than Mike was, but with the same thick dark hair. She wrapped her arm around her mother's shoulders, tugged her back from where she'd been screaming in Mads' face, inches away. Mads hadn't even noticed. The girl pulled her mother back, said, "It's not her fault, it's okay, you hafta' calm down, Mama." 

And her mother sobbed, and the girl looked torn between apologetic and furious. It was a strange look for a face to hold. 

Mads excused herself, stepped back a few paces, made her way to her truck. She ducked around the side of it and before she could get the key in the door to unlock it, a wave of nausea hit her hard enough to knock her off balance, had her doubling over her knees and vomiting onto the pavement. Stomach bile, bitter awful coffee, and a tint of blood. She puked and heaved, gasping for breath when her empty stomach finished tossing, held herself up by gripping the door with trembling hands. 

Abigail had nearly shot him out there, while he laid seizing from pain and poison in Mads' arms, the stench of death radiating off of him. He was gone and they all knew it. Abigail had held a gun in her trembling hand, sobs wracking her body, as she said, "Please, please, it's easier, just let me put him out of his misery." 

Mads hadn't let her, hadn't had the heart to make that call. 

Mike had died slowly and painfully, and the abomination caught up with them, and Thacker and Abigail unloaded into the beast while Mads threw herself at it fists first. 

Abigail had been silent on the ride back, had asked to be dropped at home. Mads should check up on her. She had a sick feeling that their numbers were shrinking significantly that weekend.

Eventually, Mads' head stopped spinning and she crawled into her truck and collapsed back on the seat. A gunshot wound would have been too hard to explain. Mrs. Castino didn't need to identify her son's body with a bullet between the eyes. She shouldn't have had to identify it at all, not if Mads had done her fucking job, not if she'd kept him safe. 

No more kids in the Pine Guard, she thought to herself, holding the steering wheel with a white knuckle grip to force her hands to stop shaking. There was recon to do, future hunts to plan. She didn't have time to mourn.

She'd leave that up to his family, to those unburdened by the secrets their boy had kept.

  
  


\---

  
  
  


> It was obvious from the way that Stern jumped out of his skin and sloshed his coffee all over his arm and the front of his t-shirt that he hadn’t seen her sitting there by the fireplace. Her chair was nestled against the window, giving her a nice view over the front porch and gravel lot in front of it, close to the fire to keep warm but not quite close enough that she melted her slippers. 
> 
> It had happened before. 
> 
> She’d gotten a new trigger for her sawed-off a few days prior down at Beck’s, and she was just now getting the chance to go about installing it. The old one stuck and had to be jerked back into place after each pull, which was annoying at best and a hazard at worst. Mama didn’t care if there weren’t any monsters left to hunt. She liked to take care of her things. 
> 
> She waited patiently and silently for Stern to catch his breath, heart obviously pounding under the hand clutching his chest. She grinned at him, shamelessly, and his whole face grew a quiet thrumming pink as he wiped his hand off on his shirt.
> 
> “Good morning,” he said, “Didn’t mean to bother--”
> 
> “Have a seat,” Mama interrupted, and she wasn’t surprised when Stern complied. He was an alright guy, despite Mama’s initial assumptions about him. He’d earned himself a bit of respect back when push came to shove. Had really proved himself in a way Mama hadn’t expected him to. 
> 
> He also hadn’t run off the way Mama had expected him to. Maybe he had some made-up assignment keeping an eye on the happenings around Kepler, or maybe he’d quit the FBI altogether. One way or another, here he was in her Lodge. It was early in the morning, sun just starting to come up and make the snow-covered ground sparkle. The rest of the Lodge hadn’t started stirring yet. 
> 
> “Would you like a cup?” he offered, motioning to the coffee mug he held in his own hand. She held up a hand and shook her head, no. He was still dressed in pajamas-- a pair of FBI issued gym shorts with his name in Sharpie on the logo, and a t-shirt several sizes too big on him that Mama was, actually, very familiar with. 
> 
> It had been Thacker’s, some hand-me-down from a relative far larger than he was. He’d left it around Mama’s apartment back in the day, and Barclay had started wearing it around when he’d first come to them. Now here it was again, Kepler High School Track and Field hanging down well past Stern’s hips and communicating something Mama hadn’t quite known the answer to just yet. 
> 
> She’d had her suspicions, though. 
> 
> She didn’t quite know how she felt about it.
> 
> “So you and Barclay, huh?” she asked, and watched his face heat up even brighter. He hid it behind a long slurp of coffee, giving them both an extra moment. 
> 
> “Well, um,” he finally answered. He chewed his bottom lip, traded his mug between hands, and uncrossed his legs. He said, “Is that a problem?” eyes stuck on the dismantled gun in Mama’s lap.
> 
> Mama wanted to chuckle, so she let herself. She hoped it didn’t come off as menacing. “It’s not a problem,” she told him, because it wasn’t. 
> 
> Mama loved Barclay with more depth than she would have believed possible when she was younger. Twenty-five years with a person would do that to you. They’d experienced everything a person could experience together, shoulder to shoulder the whole time, feeling a whole lot stronger knowing someone was at their back. She loved Thacker like that too, loved him enough to go face death out in the Wilds of Sylvain, but when he’d disappeared that first time Barclay had been the one sitting up with her all night as she scrambled to figure out what to do.
> 
> She hated feeling out of control, hated the panic and rage and insecurity, and Barclay was only person she trusted with all of that.
> 
> “Is this gonna turn into a shovel talk?” Stern asked her, and this time Mama laughed out loud and hearty. 
> 
> She said, “Son, my shotgun ain’t even put together properly. How am I supposed to threaten you?” 
> 
> “I’m sure you could find a way if you wanted,” he replied, cheeky. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he grinned, unafraid. Then he blinked in a bit of confusion and asked, “Where’d you even  _ get _ that? Did you steal it back--?”
> 
> “Always have a back up,” Mama told him. “You can only imagine what else I got hidden in my gun safe.”
> 
> Stern sighed like he was being put upon, slouching relaxed back into his seat the way he never would have a year prior. He took a sip of his coffee. Mama considered his question further, and eventually answered, “I don’t have to tell you not to hurt Barclay. I’m not gonna threaten to bury you out back, deep in the woods that nobody knows quite as well as I do, in an animal graveyard where you won’t be noticed even if they  _ do _ dig it up lookin’ for ya.” 
> 
> Joseph Stern met her eye and blinked, once, carefully. He didn’t shake too easy, being FBI and all. When Mama caved in and cracked the tiniest smile, he grinned and relaxed again. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he replied. “You wouldn’t dream of it.” 
> 
> Mama nodded, finger-tightening a screw to hold the pieces together for the time being. She said, “Barclay don’t need me to protect him anyway. He’s a grown Sylph. He can handle you just fine.”
> 
> She considered making a sex joke, something like  _ ‘But he’s never been too inclined to be the one doing the handling. _ ’ But Stern was already blushing to the tips of his ears, so Mama figured she ought to leave him alone. 
> 
> She stood, planning to take her gun back to her office and finish it up, clean it, and stock it away with the others. She ruffled Stern’s hair as she went, messing it up and not being too gentle about it. Some messages didn’t need to be sent as out-right threats. 
> 
> And anyways. Barclay seemed awful fond of the guy. Best not keep trying to scare him away.
> 
>   
>    
>    
> 

\---

\---

  
  





" **MADELINE COBB** ," a booming voice exploded behind her, presence not announced by any noise of footsteps or shifting of clothing. Minerva was a warrior beyond anything they could ever hope to become. Her reflexes were timeless, nerves hardened to steel. Mama liked to imagine herself pretty competent after all of these years at hunting. 

That didn't save her from getting startled, from whirling around with the closest thing she could get her hands on held before her in attack.

" **I HAVE HEARD GREAT TALES OF THIS BEANS OF GREEN HOT DISH** \--" Minerva cut off mid-sentence, staring down at the butter knife held in Mama's grasp the way one might oggle at a particularly unimpressive fish at the aquarium. 

She asked, " **DO YOU WISH TO ENGAGE IN A SPARRING MATCH, MADELINE COBB**?" and Duck came skidding into the kitchen in sock feet, like some kind of teenager, like one of her kids, not like the forty-something warrior that he was.

He stopped short, looking between the two of them and the knife before a smile started to crack at the edges of his face. He said, "Geez, Mama, you tryin' ta kill my wife now?"

" **I AM ALWAYS EAGER FOR A CHANCE TO SPAR, THOUGH WE MUST 'TAKE IT OUTSIDE' AS PER FRIEND BARCLAY'S REQUEST, AS HE IS NOT PLEASED WITH ATTEMPTS AT SPARRING WITHIN THE WALLS**." 

There was a sign hanging above the microwave that read "No wrassling by the casseroles" in a messy script on a faux-aged board. Aubrey had gotten it for him last Candlenights, and she'd laughed and laughed. Duck nodded towards it as he spoke. 

"Yeah, the sign is pretty clear on the rules," he said. And Duck, though not always the brightest candle on the altar, was often more intuitive than people gave him credit for. He was good at reading people, just not always good at what to do after reading them. 

He sure was an awkward bastard, the poor guy. 

This time, though, he must have rolled an eleven. He frowned a bit, mostly in the eyes, and said, "You doin' okay there, Mama?"

And Mama realized she was still holding the knife, still in a startled stance, and she forced herself to relax. She put the butter knife down. She regarded his question seriously, declining the urge to brush it away dismissively. 

Mama had fought too hard for too long, had lived a rough life and accrued a lot of damage for it. She had injuries that would never really heal, nightmares that would never really leave her. She had reflexes that made her pull useless weapons on innocent friends. She probably ought to go to therapy, though yeah no, there was no way in hell that was happening. 

Mama also had a Lodge that was bustling with activity, a Candlenights tree glistening in the corner of their main room, a crackling fireplace. She had family and friends around, their voices overflowing in the room next door. She had residents who were safe, who were free. Residents who'd built lives. Jake had grown up, had his work, his confidence back. Barclay had friends in every home in Kepler.

It was a cold winter night in Kepler, but nothing was biting, nothing was uncomfortable. She'd spent all of that time learning, trying, struggling to protect herself and the ones who needed her, and the battle was finally over. Thacker poked his head through the pass-through, terrible beard and all, and said, "What's takin' so long in there, Maddie?" and she found that she didn't hate the nickname, not just then.

“I’m doing just fine, Duck,” Mama said. She tossed the butter knife aside, socked Minverva jovially on the shoulder, and lumbered back to the living room to join the party.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are wonderful, if you feel like it. 
> 
> If you're waiting for something else of mine to update... hang in there. Young & Menace is coming back real soon.


End file.
